The Daughters Debt: How Black Spirituality and Politics are Transforming the Televisual Landscape

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 9-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josslyn Luckett
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
Paule Marshall ◽  
Women's Spirituality ◽  
Spiritual Practices ◽  
Toni Cade Bambara ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Film Directors ◽  
Black Spirituality

The spectrum of black women's spirituality in television has become nearly as diverse as the portraits of Afro-Atlantic spiritual practices that became central to key literary works of black feminist authors of the 1980s, such as Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. While many are the spiritual and televisual daughters of the authors mentioned above, this essay argues that the appearance of this wider range of black women's spirituality and activism in episodic television owes its greatest debt to two films from the 1990s, Julie Dash's, Daughters of the Dust (1991) and Kasi Lemmons’ Eve's Bayou (1997). I focus here on two shows which were themselves created by Black women feature film directors, Shots Fired (Gina Prince Bythewood with Reggie Rock Bythewood) and Queen Sugar (Ava DuVernay). I examine how characters like Pastor Janae (from Shots) and Nova Bordelon (from Sugar) use their spiritual practices in service of social justice, family, and community healing in ways that connect them to the women of Dash and Lemmons’ earlier films.

The Kinkiness of Turquoise

Groove Theory ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 182-223
Author(s):  
Tony Bolden
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Vocal Technique ◽  
Black Feminists ◽  
Bessie Smith ◽  
Critical Methods

This chapter showcases Betty Davis’s transposition of women’s blues into rock-inflected version of funk. Bolden advances two key arguments. First, Davis reprised the sexual politics and rebellious spirit exemplified by singers Bessie Smith and Ida Cox, for instance, and reinterpreted those principles in modern America. Second, Davis’s eroticism and sui generis style of funk, which she expressed in her recordings and onstage, reflected a sexual politics that served as a counterpart to those of black feminists writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and many others who were publishing coextensively. But whereas black feminist writers often wrote about black women in previous generations, Davis not only addressed contradictions that black women encountered in contemporary street culture; she also represented such X-rated sexual desires as sadomasochism in her songwriting. In addition, the chapter provides biographical information that contextualizes Davis’s route to the music industry, and Bolden uses critical methods from scholarship on African American poetry to illuminate Davis’s vocal technique. 

scholarly journals Rebellious and Strong Black Women in Paradise

2015 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 122-132
Author(s):  
Zadmehr Torabi ◽  
Parvin Ghasemi
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
Change Agents ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Feminists ◽  
Patriarchal Ideology ◽  
Unique Identity ◽  
Strong Black Women ◽  
And Gender

The main aim of this paper is to apply black feminist tenets especially those of Bell Hooks and Alice Walker to demonstrate that unlike the passive black female characters of The Bluest Eye, and the resisting but finally victimized black women of Beloved, the wise and strong black women of Paradise who live in the Convent, are strong enough to recreate themselves as subjects, and to cultivate their own unique identity in a hegemonic environment which is replete with racial and gender discrimination. Black feminist actions and womanistic rituals help them accomplish this improvement. Consolata, and Mavis are two of such strong women of the Convent who not only succeed in healing themselves, but also in healing other black women as well. Black feminists claim in order to place black women at the center of stories about the American past, they must be depicted as subjects, that is, as creative change-agents, rather than as objects, or victims of hegemonic agency. In Paradise black women are depicted thus, have their own voices, and completely reject the patriarchal ideology.

scholarly journals Womanism and Women in Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Dhavaleswarapu Ratna Hasanthi
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
White Women ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
The United States ◽  
Paule Marshall ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Temple

African-American women have been inappropriately and unduly, stereotyped in various contrasting images as slaves post-slavery, wet nurses, super women, domestic helpers, mammies, matriarchs, jezebels, hoochies, welfare recipients, and hot bodies which discloses their repression in the United States of America. They have been showcased by both black men and white women in different ways quite contrary to their being in America. Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Gayl Jones, Paule Marshall, Sonia Sanchez, Toni Cade Bambara, to name a few writers, have put forth the condition of black women through their works. They have shown the personality of many a black women hidden behind the veils of racism, sexism, classism and systemic oppression of different sorts. Walker coined the term Womanism in her 1984 collection of essays titled In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. Womanism advocates consensus for black women starting with gender and proceeding over to race, ethnicity and class, with a universal outlook. Womanism offers a positive self-definition of the black woman’s self within gendered, historical, geographical, ethnic, racial and cultural contexts too. Walker’s novel The Temple of My Familiar 1989 is a womanist treatise putting forth the importance of womanist consciousness and womanist spirit. The novel is a tribute to the strength, endurance and vitality of black womanhood. The novel revolves around three pairs of characters and their lives to showcase the lives of African Americans and coloured population in America. The three couples namely Suwelo and Fanny, Arveyda and Carlotta, Lissie and Hal showcased in the novel, belong to different age groups and different, mixed ethnicities. Through them, Walker depicts the lives of marginalized population in America, and the umpteen trials they face for being who they are. Furthermore, this paper showcases how Womanism as a theory can really enliven the life of the black community, especially black women when put into practice.

Romantic (In)Justice: Criminal-Legal System-Impacted Black Women’s Romantic Relationship Status and Quality

2021 ◽  
pp. 155708512110194
Author(s):  
Allison E. Monterrosa
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Romantic Relationship ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Relationship Status ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Psychological Strain ◽  
System Data ◽  
Criminal Legal System

This study of working class, heterosexual, criminal-legal system-impacted Black women described the women’s romantic histories and current romantic relationship statuses in terms of commitment, exclusivity, and perceived quality. Using intersectional research methods, qualitative interviews were conducted with 31 Black women between the ages of 18 and 65 years who were working class, resided in Southern California, and were impacted by the criminal-legal system. Data were analyzed using an intersectional Black feminist criminological framework and findings revealed six types of relationship statuses. These relationship statuses did not live up to the women’s aspirations and yielded disparate levels of emotional and psychological strain across relationship statuses.

scholarly journals Black feminist intersectionality is vital to group analysis: Can group analysis allow outsider ideas in?

2021 ◽  
pp. 053331642199776
Author(s):  
Suryia Nayak
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
Group Analysis ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Online Platform ◽  
Large Group ◽  
Diversity And Inclusion ◽  
Analytical Structure ◽  
The Relationship

This is the transcript of a speech I gave at an Institute of Group Analysis (IGA) event on the 28th November 2020 about intersectionality and groups analysis. This was momentous for group analysis because it was the first IGA event to focus on black feminist intersectionality. Noteworthy, because it is so rare, the large group was convened by two black women, qualified members of the IGA—a deliberate intervention in keeping with my questioning of the relationship between group analysis and power, privilege, and position. This event took place during the Covid-19 pandemic via an online platform called ‘Zoom’. Whilst holding the event online had implications for the embodied visceral experience of the audience, it enabled an international attendance, including members of Group Analysis India. Invitation to the event: ‘Why the black feminist idea of intersectionality is vital to group analysis’ Using black feminist intersectionality, this workshop explores two interconnected issues: • Group analysis is about integration of parts, but how do we do this across difference in power, privilege, and position? • Can group analysis allow outsider ideas in? This question goes to the heart of who/ what we include in group analytic practice—what about black feminism? If there ‘cannot possibly be one single version of the truth so we need to hear as many different versions of it as we can’ (Blackwell, 2003: 462), we need to include as many different situated standpoints as possible. Here is where and why the black feminist idea of intersectionality is vital to group analysis. On equality, diversity and inclusion, intersectionality says that the ‘problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including black [people] within an already established analytical structure’ (Crenshaw, 1989: 140). Can group analysis allow the outsider idea of intersectionality in?

Customer Service Representatives

2021 ◽  
Vol 120 (3) ◽  
pp. 553-571
Author(s):  
Julian Kevon Glover
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Customer Service ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Transgender Women ◽  
Average Life Expectancy ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
Murder Rate ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Customer Service Representatives

This article investigates sex work among Black transgender women in Chicago’s ballroom scene, drawing on ethnographic data to argue that Black transwomen engage in sex work as a practice of self-investment undergirded by an epistemological shift regarding the centrality of affective labor to their work. In so doing, interlocutors reap the benefits of deploying embodied knowledge—the harnessing and transformation of insight derived from lived experiences of racial, gender, and sexual subjection into useful strategies, tactics, and tools—to secure material and human resources necessary for survival. A focus on how Black transwomen live, despite continued physical, spiritual, socioeconomic, political, and cultural annihilation, remains critically important given the myriad indicators (low average life expectancy, low annual income, disproportionally high murder rate, etc.) that expose the world’s indifference to the plight of this community and Black bodies writ large. Further, the author places interlocutors in conversation with Black feminist historians’ and theorists’ discussions of sex work among Black women to expose points of convergence between Black cis- and transgender women. The author also complicates narratives that link sex work to “survival” and subsequently obfuscate explorations of limited and situated agency among Black women that have significant historical precedent.

scholarly journals Black Feminist Triptych

Homiletic ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-13
Author(s):  
Donyelle C. McCray
Keyword(s):  
Black Feminism ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Speech Event ◽  
Angela Davis ◽  
June Jordan

Two driving features of Black feminism are care and collectivity. This article considers them as vectors for Christian preaching. I focus on a specific speech event that involves Alice Walker, Angela Davis, and June Jordan, and treat it as a case study for Black feminist preaching. Ultimately, I propose a triptych approach to preaching that entails layering sermonic messages, accommodating dissonance, and foregrounding mutuality.

scholarly journals Memeification of Black Women’s Trauma

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Stravens
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
The People ◽  
Online Spaces ◽  
History Of

This piece discusses the online and offline discourses on the lives and bodies of Black femme and nonbinary individuals and the harm that is so casually inflicted upon us. Through popular stories of harm performed around famous Black women, such as with rapper Megan Thee Stallion, I connect the history of Black women in popular culture to current online spaces that continue to minimize and trivialize our trauma. I seek to highlight that these stories are not an anomaly, but rather sentiments rooted in the misogynoir that is so entrenched in western culture and have been expanded and weaponized within the online sphere. In addition, the piece challenges the universality of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in its implementation, criticizing its propensity to forget its feminine victims. It is important to emphasize where it has failed and where it needs to be intentional about the people it has overlooked, as this is a movement that began online, where this harm is currently taking place, and at the hands and energies of Black femmes, the very people getting hurt. This piece has manifested from many conversations already occurring in online Black feminist spaces about our treatment and our needs. It invites others into the fold and seeks to encourage individuals to critically reflect on how Black femme and non-binary individuals are presented on their timeline in-between the numerous BLM posts that claim to protect them.

Writing Ourselves into Existence

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-27
Author(s):  
Shardé M. Davis ◽  
Frances Ashun ◽  
Alleyha Dannett ◽  
Kayla Edwards ◽  
Victoria Nwaohuocha
Keyword(s):  
Women Students ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Research Team ◽  
Black Feminist Thought ◽  
Feminist Research ◽  
Hostile Environment ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Critical Autoethnography ◽  
Research Praxis

Academia can be a hostile environment for Black women. Our research team leveraged Black feminist research praxis to produce new knowledge countering conceptions of Black women students and faculty as people who are unintelligent, produce superfluous work, and worthy of being ignored. In order to locate spaces for healing, mentorship, and validation, we engaged in a collaborative autoethnography to co-narrate our experiences while conducting a study for, by, and about Black women. Re-purposing tools from Black feminist thought, critical autoethnography, and collaborative autoethnography enabled us to write ourselves into existence, countering damaging narratives and subverting the harm inflicted by the institution.

(Other)sistering: Black Women Education Leadership Faculty Aligning Identity, Scholarship, and Practice Through Peer Support and Accountability

2022 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-113
Author(s):  
Nakia M. Gray-Nicolas ◽  
Marsha E. Modeste ◽  
Angel Miles Nash ◽  
Lolita A. Tabron
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Black Feminist Thought ◽  
Community Cultural Wealth ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Cultural Wealth ◽  
Dynamic Support ◽  
Assistant Professors ◽  
Insight Into

This inquiry offers insight into how Black women assistant professors traverse the challenging journey toward tenure while acknowledging their connection to their students and communities, research, teaching, and service. By employing a phenomenological approach and utilizing Black feminist thought and community cultural wealth as conceptual and theoretical frameworks, this research advances scholarship identifying commonalities across Black women’s experiences. Further, we offer implications for how the academy can support Black women and other professionals from marginalized populations. Findings include how Black women assistant professors develop and create dynamic support systems amongst themselves to combat the multiple marginalizations of their positionality in the academy––a place where they are historically “outsiders.”

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